Comments on "Comparison of Guidelines for Older Web Users"

I think it would be useful to review the requirements and goals [2] of 
this document [1], to check whether it is really usable for its purpose. 
It doesn't seem to "Show that WCAG 2.0 covers most if not all of the 
needs of older users." and I wonder whether it has all the necessary 
information. Here are some specific comments:

For the title is it necessary to say "literature review"? Perhaps it 
could be shortened to something like "WAI Guidelines and the needs of 
older Web users."

"This document compares collected recommendations on designing Web pages 
to be usable by older people with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 
(WCAG) from the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)." I think this is 
rather cumbersome to read. Perhaps start with explaining the sources: 
"The WAI-AGE Project is intended to increase accessibility of the Web 
for older people as well as for people with disabilities. It has 
collected recommendations on designing Web pages to be usable by older 
people. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has published the Web 
Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This document compares the 
collected recommendations with the Web Content Accessibility 
Guidelines." Which is slightly longer but easier to digest a bit at a time.

"The first column in the tables below": perhaps say first that the 
information is in table format. For example, "The comparison is arranged 
below in four tables one for each of the four principles... The first 
column..."

"The information is loosely grouped under four principles": perhaps the 
terms "loosely" and "rough" and "definitive" need some explanation.

In the tables perhaps the header cell text "Collected Recommendations" 
would be better as "Recommendations collected from literature."

I wonder whether it will be evident to people that the "Collected 
Recommendations" header is for the column and not for the row 
(scope="col" is not visible). It would be if they analyse the table but 
at the from first reading.

I'm not convinced that the table format is useful (but perhaps that's 
already been discussed). Will people want to compare WCAG 1.0 and 2.0 
coverage?

Perhaps the terms in the "Collected Recommendations" column could be 
annotated with links to the WAI Glossary. I understand it all but 
perhaps non-specialists may not.

Although the yet-to-be written appendix to the literature review (is it 
within the scope of the Lit Rev? It doesn't seem to be discussed very 
much in that document) covers "Notations on whether the recommendations 
are partially or fully covered in WCAG" perhaps a symbol or something in 
the table would save people an awful lot of back-and-forward navigation 
between documents.

regards,

Alan

[1] http://www.w3.org/WAI/WAI-AGE/comparative.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/changelogs/cl-wai-age-general.html

Received on Friday, 12 September 2008 10:45:02 UTC